 Thanks so much for coming to our opening event for the exhibition, Survival in Sarajevo. And the exhibit, Survival in Sarajevo, is on display in the Skylight Gallery, which is on the sixth floor, from now until March 16th. So I hope you all get a chance to see it. It's a really, really wonderful story. And so anyways, it's my great pleasure to introduce to you, Ed Sarada. He is a journalist, a photographer, a filmmaker, and Ed founded Centropa in 2000. So please help me welcome Ed Sarada. I'd like to thank you all very much for coming tonight. And I will be something of the master. I'll play Ed Sullivan, introducing our guest. And what we'll do is as follows. We'll hear from a couple of people who I've asked to say a few words. And then I'll speak about this project a little more. We'll watch a short film that is now being used in more than 250 schools and a dozen countries. It is narrated in English by me, except in England, where we have a Downton Abbey type narrator, because they don't like my accent there. And then we also have it's also in German and in Spanish and in Hebrew. And we have versions with Albanian subtitles and Arabic subtitles. And I know that because the time is short, I'll introduce someone to say a few words at the beginning. And that is Eil Noor is the deputy consul general here in San Francisco. And we met in an auditorium like this in Belgrade two years ago when my institute created a multimedia film about two sisters, two Serbian girls, two Jewish girls, who were saved during the Holocaust by a Catholic priest. And that film, we launched it in Belgrade. And that film is now being used in more than 100 schools throughout Serbia. And as a matter of fact, I'll be in Serbia in two weeks to conduct a seminar about it. The Sephardic history of the Balkans is long and it's extremely complex, as you all know, and I'll go into a few things. But I know that, Eil, you have to leave soon. But I'm glad that you've rushed back from Sacramento to be with us. And if you would just say a few words of welcome, because we appreciate very much your support for this event. So thank you very much, Eil Noor. Good evening. The war in Yugoslavia started in 1991. First, Slovenia, followed by the bloody conflict between Serbia and Croatia. And in 1992, the war in Bosnia began. This exhibition, the 64, tells us how a tiny Jewish community with around 1,000 members helped save a multi-ethnic city of Sarajevo by working with all the neighbors of every religion. For the first time during a modern European war, Jews in danger had a place to go to. They had a state of their own, the state of Israel. Although most people don't know, Jewish organizations like the Jewish agency and the Joint Distribution Committee set up offices in Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo so that the Jewish families could be quickly processed and brought to Israel. There, they were welcomed. Schools welcomed their children. Language lessons were provided for everybody, as well as housing. But were they all Jews? If you believe so, I recommend you take another walk around the exhibition upstairs. All of these refugees waited for the war to end so they can go home. But it went on for years. Many of those Yugoslavs became ex-Jugoslavs and have enriched the Israeli society ever since. The story that means the most to us, I think, is the story of Zeyneba Hardaga. And her story is on one of the panels up there. In 1985, Zeyneba became the first Muslim to receive Righteous Gentile Award. She saved a Jewish neighbor during the Second World War. Israel's Museum of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, has given out thousands of such awards to those brave non-Jews who risked their lives, their own lives, to save a friend, a neighbor, or a complete stranger. But this story has a twist. Because seven years after the hero was recognized, it was she who needed saving. And Zeyneba, her daughter, and her son-in-law and granddaughter were all brought to Israel. She was then invited to Prime Minister's Robin's office, the late Prime Minister Robin. She was, as you can imagine, overwhelmed. My friend Ed tells me that the event took place on a Friday afternoon in Jerusalem in May 1994. Zeyneba had been in Israel since February that year. And you can say that those two months left quite an impression on her. Because after the ceremony, she turned to the reporters and told them to go home and prepare for Shabbos. She was a Muslim Bosniak, by the way. This exhibition is mostly about how Jews and their neighbors and friends in Sarajevo who were serving in Orthodox, Catholic Croats, and Bosniak Muslims all worked together to help save their city. As a representative of the State of Israel and as somebody who served in the Balkans until recently, and try to make friends with all different people there and try to have them be friends with each other, I'm proud to say that in the quietest way Israel played its part. It gave those who needed help what they needed most. A place of refuge. Thank you. Normally, I'm certainly not a war photographer. I made my name photographing Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. And to be honest, chubby little rabbis who sat in their chairs and served you ruggola and tea were my kind of people to photograph. It was easier. And you ate better. But in 1993, I was in somebody had from a museum, and I won't say which, thought that the Serbs were going to come back to Dubrovnik which had been surrounded and attacked in 1992. They thought they were going to come back and attack the city and they were going to destroy the synagogue which I thought was the stupidest thing I ever heard except they offered me a job to go there and document the synagogue in Dubrovnik, which I did. And when I was leaving Dubrovnik, I was changing planes in Zagreb and I saw someone from the Jewish community of Sarajevo, one of the leaders of the community who looked at me like a favorite student who had gone wrong. And he said, you know, you came to visit us quite a few times in the 1980s when things were good. And I hope you made a lot of money from your first book. And he said, but we really need you now. And I said, well, I couldn't possibly come to Sarajevo. I have a terrible allergy. He said, what kind of allergy could you have? I said, I'm allergic to bullets. And he said, oh, we have aspirin for that. And I was so charmed by that answer that I decided to get on a UN transport and flew in with him. And what I saw in Sarajevo was simply really unbelievable or not unbelievable for anyone who's from Sarajevo. And what we had is an old synagogue from 1903-1908 when it was built, the Ashkenazi synagogue of the city built by the Austrians to make it look like a Sephardic synagogue and insult the majority of the Jews there back at the time. And who was working for the Jewish community inside? It was, we now use the term Bosniak instead of Muslim, Bosniak Muslims, Catholic Croats and Serbs and Jews. And I remember I sent Peter Schneider, who was a very big German journalist from the Holiday Inn where all the reporters were saying, I said, you got to go and take a look at that place. And he came back and said, what did you think? And he said, it's so noisy there. Everybody's yelling and they're so valuable about everything. And what we had here is the war itself could not have been worse. The city was besieged in May of 1992. Now, if you went home tonight and you went to get to turn on the tap of water and nothing came out, you went to flush the toilet, didn't work, you went to turn on the heat or the air conditioning, the electricity was out. And know that it wouldn't come back on for the next three years. And it gets a lot colder and a lot hotter in Sarajevo than it does here. An entire society had been surrounded and was being starved. From the outside, the West sent in food packages from time to time. But by and large, twiddled their thumbs, agonized over what they should possibly do, and we see this kind of thing happening today in other parts of the world. And this was in the heart of Europe. And 11,000 Sarajevans were either shot down or blown up. Tens of thousands were wounded. Bosnian Serbs surrounded the city and lobbed grenades up to 1,600 a day into the city. And from Belgrade, coming from Serbia, men would come for the weekend with their hunting rifles. And sit above on Vratse and other parts of the hills. And for sport, shoot down people. This is how it was. The trauma of families who went through this still have to deal with it. As you probably know that during a war, during a siege, during a war, very few people actually commit suicide because you're so worried about existing that you don't think in those terms. It's afterwards that the emotion sweeps over you. The people of Sarajevo who refused to leave the city and many didn't refuse to leave out of moral standing because nobody wanted them. They couldn't get out for most of them, but they didn't. Zina Baserovic is one of those people who's not Jewish, who came from Sarajevo. She's now on the staff of Berkeley. And I've asked Zina to share some of her stories as a 13-year-old girl growing up in Sarajevo, and she'll say a few words to paint in a couple of the pictures for us. Zina? I want to say, I just want to start with something that just kind of this is totally unpremeditated, but I just want to mention something that happened just 10, 15 minutes ago. So while we were all upstairs mingling, this gentleman comes up to me and my friend who's standing there and talking in this elderly gentleman comes up to us and he says, is there anybody here who speaks Bosnian? So I go, well, I do. So he introduces himself and immediately we kind of get into a conversation and in the first three minutes of the conversation, so he tells me that he's 85 years old and in the first three minutes of the conversation he really basically in such a poignant way sums up how ironic and ridiculous that whole conflict was. He says, you know, I am 85 years old and I was with the, back in 1945 in the Second World War, I was with the battalion that came into Sarajevo and freed the city. And I was, my commander was Pedro Kosorich and I think for me as a child, as a Sarajevan child, I think, oh, well that's the name of, used to be the name of one of the main squares in the city. And he says, you know, back then it was all about brotherhood and unity and all of us Serbs and Croats and Muslims, we were all together and we were fighting the foreign enemy and because we were together we repelled this foreign enemy and then a few decades down the line I lived to see a complete reversal of the situation where we turn on each other and the outside forces tried to intervene to keep us together but we repelled them because of that. So I thought that that was such a, it was really such a good way to sum up the sort of, the paradox of the conflict and we both kind of agreed on one fact that during that time Sarajevo was, it was a little world unto itself and there was no, I mean it was, there was like, there was an immediate agreement between an 85-year-old and a 30-year-old that yes, you know, there in Sarajevo we all stuck together, didn't we? It was, there was no difference, there was no, it was not really, it was irrelevant what your name is and what your background is, we all suffered the same and we also all tried to help each other in the same way and I think for me as a child growing up in that situation and it's no exaggeration anything that Ed was trying to sketch for you briefly just now about the conditions of life and how horrendous it was I think for me that experience kind of, it is, of course it is horrible to, it is undescribably horrible to grow up under threat and under bonds and under, you know, really living as a hostage for three and a half years of your life and being hungry and being cold and being just stripped of any kind of notion of future and dreams and sort of as a child being just limited in what you can dream about but that sort of, that spirit of Sarajevo, that spirit of togetherness that kind of, that community that we've built and that we stuck to and that we really stubbornly stuck with and did not want to renounce that was the kind of, that was the shred of decency and the shred of humanity that pulled us through all of that. I think that is the reason why we survived what we've survived because if you think about it in terms of what it was for all that time it's hard to imagine that anybody can survive it and remain sane so I think it's that kind of, that spirit of togetherness and sort of just joint humanity it's something that not only kept us alive and strong but I think it has made a whole generation of young people like myself really into the sort of individuals that I now when I think about my generation about my friends spread throughout the world into extraordinary people in terms of the passion and the drive and the compulsion that we have to make a difference in the world not to make a difference just in Sarajevo to go back there and to make a difference there yes sure but to make a difference in the world and to also stand as an example of how you can get through that and how you can make a difference. So in my work I work here, I teach at UC Berkeley and my whole sort of when I talk on this topic I usually have like a repertoire and I say well you know this is really about, this is about my past because it's what I've been through, this is about my present because it's about the work that I do and this is about the future that defines the sort of changes that I want to make in my life in this world in as much as I can and I have been in it, I have worked in the field of human rights my whole life and I intend to stay there not because it's a deliberate career choice, it's a labor of love and compulsion and when I talk about these things I often think okay well I can take several different perspectives I can talk from a professional experience because I've done all this work with all these international organizations and I can talk about development and post war development and problems and what not I can talk from an academic perspective because I've studied it so much I can talk from a personal perspective and that's when everybody's attention sparks up because that is the story that people usually want to hear what is it like, what was it like to be a child in that situation and how does a child in that situation become this kind of an adult who can really stand on her own two feet because believe me the experiences that people have been through you would think that it would be difficult to do even that much just stand on your feet for the rest of your life so what I thought I would share with you is when the war started I was a kid much like if you remember the picture on your invitation of that little boy who was looking out of the window and crying it's a picture of a boy whose parents have decided to send him away a lot of kids ended up in that kind of a predicament and this is such a familiar picture of these buses bus loads of kids being sent away from the city and now as a parent myself I can appreciate how devastating that is but a lot of the kids remained and have gone through that experience and myself like a lot of other kids we wrote journals every day and I remember it's totally coincidental but it's also very ironic just before the war started one of the last books that we read at school as assigned books to read for homework was The Diary of Anne Frank and it was totally, you couldn't have planned it better because shortly after that the war started and when I started writing my journal as a 13-year-old I remembered how Anne Frank used to write to this imaginary friend so I started writing my diary to her and I would start my entries with Duran and kind of also respond to some of the things that she was talking about and try to kind of talk to her and tell her how in some respects you know Anne the situation for us is worse and then I would kind of elaborate why I think we're having it worse than Anne Frank so because I still kept all my journals when we talked about this event I thought well maybe it would be one thing that would be interesting if I found a little snippet out of my journal and shared it with you so I found something and well obviously given the time it was written in Bosnia but I've tried to translate it as kind of literally and true to the spirit as I could so I'm gonna read it out and okay so this is dated January 13th 1993 that says Duran I was thinking about what you said how boring it is to be locked up and hiding to not be able to go outside there's only so much you can do and it isn't much now when the days are so short in the winter it gets dark at four in the afternoon and it slides out for any reading or writing I tried to sit by the window to catch the last drops of dusk light but then my mother starts shouting are you out of your mind? get away from that window before a bullet gets you you know they can see us I wonder who they are and why it bothers them that I'm sitting in the window and reading Dad says it bothers them because they're not the reading sort he says that they are a bunch of thugs sitting up there in the hills getting drunk and firing out bombs just to meet the daily requirements for carnage there are also no more candles the Catholic Church is not giving them out anymore they say they've handed out all they had they've none left I think they're lying maybe you need to be a crott to get some it would be nice to have some light because in the dark I really get bored then I think about all the other stuff like how cold it is then mom starts to lead her exercise time jumping up and down and all that we all feel stupid you're right Anne the worst thing is the nights are so long we got a Red Cross message from my aunt she says she sent a package through benevolentia it's love benevolentia but I'm saying benevolentia so that's the Jewish organization that we're talking about here mom's been going around there checking the lists every day but there's nothing yet they don't open the packages the Jews don't like the others so everything that is put in the package you get seven exclamation marks if my aunt has any sense there'll be some chocolate in there well I can't write anymore it's too dark there's nothing important happening anyways when I read this I really paused over and I thought there's nothing important happening this is a teenage perspective I couldn't get over the road today to CJ that was my best friend I don't know anything about her boyfriend situation but I'll keep you posted on that and that's the entry for that day and it kind of just as a footnote to the love benevolentia thing so the organization was and the reason why I was so excited was that it was true like all the packages that we would get somebody on the outside sends you the food packages that would get through various aid organizations would be at some point somewhere stopped and ravaged and anything that is anything excitement inducing would be taken out this was another way of kind of a psychological torture that was being placed on us so you would get this package and you would be over the moon there's going to be stuff in there and then there'd be the same kind of stuff that you get in humanitarian aid the only packages that never got stopped somehow miraculously were the ones that came through love benevolentia because the Jews had a special arrangement with the guys who were at the stopping points somehow, I don't know how but we loved it so it was a daily routine to go and check the lists that love benevolentia would put out every day of what packages they received and you would go there like an excited graduate student looking for your name to see if you've passed and then when you see that you've got the package it is the most exciting news because you knew there was going to be stuff in there and it wasn't really so much for the food as it was for that sort of that touch, that connection back with the civilization with that kind of, you know a little sense of human dignity being returned to you so I think really when I think about it and when I talk about it and this is something that I think most of us who have survived Sarajevo and younger people especially something that we have in common often when we talk about that time we talk about it in terms of the best moments we've had in our lives and it sounds really strange to say that in a horrible predicament like that but I think that the experiences you have that are so much about people helping each other survive on such a basic level those experiences so much transcend anything sort of any other normal kind of daily joys that they become larger and larger and for the rest of your life they become kind of markers of I don't know I guess a sense of like a pinnacle that you've reached in feeling like a good human being if that makes sense but I think that's all for me for now thank you Before we screen the film I'll say something Zena and those are very poignant words you remind me of there's a Nobel Prize which was written in was won in 1961 by Evo Andres A-N-D-R-I-C and all of his novels are here in this library Evo Andres in his most famous novel is called Bridge on the Dreamer my favorite novel was the other one which was called has different titles one title is Days of the Consul and the other is American Chronicle it's the story of the French consul in Travnik Sarajevo was not the capital of the administration center for the Ottoman Empire Travnik was and at the end of the novel it takes place during the Napoleonic period and at the end of it the French consul Napoleon has fallen and the consul's name was David has to go back to France and he has absolutely no funds to get him there and he and he's worried about how he's possibly going to get out of Travnik and all the way back to France and into his courtyard steps a man by the name of Solomon Atias a Sephardic Jew the oldest member of the Atias family in Travnik and he offers to write a letter of credit and to loan Deville the funds to get home and Deville looks at him and says to him first of all this is nobody else has offered to help me at all but what I'm most curious about Mr. Atias is the the vizier had just been bragging to me at dinner how he had stolen all the money from the Jews and he had taken all of your money so I don't know where you are even getting any money to help me and Atias looks at him and you have to understand that this was written that he wrote his trilogy his Bosnian trilogy between 1942 and 1944 and he wrote this in 1942 exactly when the Jew he was living in Belgrade in his apartment exactly at the time when the Jews of Belgrade were being rounded up and murdered all the women in gas vans and their children and the men taken out and shot and he goes into a three or four page monologue by Solomon Atias and Atias begins his monologue by saying to Deville it's true that the vizier had come to us and he had taken quite a bit of money from us he said but viziers come and viziers go but we Jews remain we remember everything that has been done to us in our hundreds of years from our expulsion from our beloved homeland Spain and we record all of these things which is why our cash boxes always have two bottoms there's one for the vizier to scoop in and take what he needs but there's always one but there's always something below that for our families and ourselves and for our friends when they are in need I read that book in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo during the siege and I couldn't believe the words that I had read because they mirror what you had said so what we'll do now is we'll take a look at this film that's based on the exhibition you don't get the Downton Abbey voice you get mine and we'll take a look at this it's short and then we'll have a little bit of a discussion of course being the kind of audience you are you probably won't have any questions you'll just want to correct me for hundreds of years in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo Catholic Croats Serbian Orthodox Muslims and Jews all live together but as Yugoslavia disintegrated in the 1990s many Serbian, Croatian and some Bosnian political leaders said we cannot live together many people believe that and war came but not everyone in Bosnia got that message here is one story between 1992 and 1995 for three years during the siege Sarajevo was cut off from the world its great buildings went up in flames more than 12,000 people were killed by mortars and snipers walls were built to hide people from the snipers signs were even put up to warn the population but it didn't always help the Bosnian Serb military forces cut off the water to the city so this park in the center of town is where people came to do their wash fill plastic jugs to bring water home to drink to bathe in to flush the toilet this is how they got it home an entire society was reduced to scrounging avoiding snipers selling whatever they had or hoped to sell and then coming home to burn a few books or a chair to keep warm and cook on a wood stove set up in the middle of the living room a great multi-ethnic city in Europe was dying the Americans and the Europeans sent in food from time to time and watched from the sidelines as Sarajevo was bombed people were losing hope holding on even though most Serbs and Croats had left Sarajevo some chose not to listen to their political leaders and felt that different people could live together so some Serbs and Jews and Muslims and Croats continued to live together in this war-torn city of Sarajevo and they were buried together too on the night the shelling started in May 1992 people from the neighborhood around the synagogue sought shelter in it that's when the community leaders like Ivica Choreshnezh, an architect and Jakob Finci, a lawyer offered them shelter for the night and food the next day soon others heard about what was going on in the synagogue and about Labenevalencia the community's humanitarian aid agency not only did people come looking for help they came looking to help so let's meet some of them the medical team this is surgeon who became the chief doctor for Labenevalencia he worked with Yadranka another doctor and Yasna was the nurse Mirjana was the pharmacist and for security there was Adnan and although he never had trouble with anyone Adnan called on sheriff whose job was actually cutting wood for the kitchen in the kitchen Tsitsko was the cook and Mara helped him serve and Novo brought in the food from the warehouse while in the office Slobodan ran the computers for the community and Atso was the secretary Vera was the treasurer and Sonja was the head of the women's club a Bohorete for communication Vlado worked the two-way radio while Timur kept the logbook in the radio room and Deion helped deliver the post which of these people were Jewish Catholic Croats Serbian Orthodox Muslim did Labenevalencia no one asked no one cared here's how Labenevalencia operated during the war surgeon tended patients in the community center and he made house calls to people like Donka Nikolich well into her 90s who needed an injection every week just to keep breathing during the war like the water the post was also cut off so the Jewish community brought in the letters for the city and journalists were asked to bring in the post and come to the synagogue where letters were filed then people were phoned and heard those wonderful words you've got mail since telephone lines were cut Labenevalencia even set up a two-way radio system to the outside world and families from all over Sarajevo came over to use it and to send messages to loved ones abroad with help from the outside world mostly from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Labenevalencia set up three pharmacies and everything in it was free even a dentist came into the community center every week as the children from the neighborhood who came in for puppet shows and celebrations to get their minds on what they could not have and so Labenevalencia could show them that someone cared many older Sarajevans sent their children and grandchildren abroad and remained alone so the Jewish women's group, La Bohoreta kept its members busy by creating treats for the children and spending their time together during the siege of Sarajevo Labenevalencia working with JDC arranged rescue convoys out of the city the largest was in February 1994 to make it happen JDC sent in logistics experts to meet with the Bosnian Prime Minister with the Bosnian Serbs and then with the UN garrison when permissions arrived lists were made the buses arrived and those approved made their way to the Jewish community center the old board of the buses the young and they prepared to leave the city where they were born in the city that they loved very much the UN escorted the convoy out of the besieged city they raced across no man's land and entered into Bosnian Serb territory that's where the UN remained and the convoy filled with 294 Sarajevans from every ethnic group made its way around the war zone and down to the coast of Croatia its final destination a journey that normally would take from Sarajevo to the coast of four hours took them over 20 of those who left on that convoy here are two stories you are looking at Zaniba Hardiga the first Muslim to receive a righteous Gentile award for saving a Jewish neighbor during the Holocaust her daughter Sarah and granddaughter Stella cared for her as did surgeon, the Serbian doctor who worked for the Jewish community and cared for his Muslim friends Zaniba and her family were invited to come to Israel and they left on that convoy in 1994 you didn't abandon the Jews Milton Wolfe, the JDC president, told her we're not going to abandon you and when she arrived in Israel even Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin welcomed her Dennis Karalic, also a Muslim was 13 years old in 1994 Dennis helped bring the water into the Jewish community every day and he and his father Harris lived with Nada Levy Dennis's father was also helping out in the Jewish community Dennis was his best friends with Rasho not his grandson and the two would study their school books even when they couldn't go to school in January 1994 Dennis was slightly wounded in a mortar attack surgeon picked the glass out of his shoulders and his back and Dennis's father told him you're going to go to Israel even though I can't so you can be safe it's not easy leaving your home it's not easy for a father to say goodbye to his son but Rasho and Dennis rode through the night and the next day for the very first time in 22 months Dennis was in a place where no one was shooting at him in the years ahead Dennis would live in Israel and finish school there and then he moved to Vienna where he spent a decade at the Holocaust Restitution Agency the National Fund when asked why a Muslim from Bosnia would work there Dennis said I remember when I was growing up in Sarajevo everyone I knew liked working together and that was what Labenevalencia was all about so by my working here today perhaps I can pay just a little bit of that back what makes it so interesting is that we're now 20 years out from this story and what makes it so compelling is that the it's being used of course because of social media and the way things are this is a story that has even more resonance now in schools everywhere then we had 20 years ago during the war what makes it so fascinating is that I neglected to say that the film also has Polish subtitles and Hungarian subtitles and we're asked now to make the film not just have subtitles but to put the film into a narration in Polish we're using it in Israel and the US Embassy in Tel Aviv we're going to have Arabic narration for Israeli Arabs it's a story that and perhaps not coincidentally I think we were all struck in this room at the death of Nelson Mandela and the outpouring of love and respect and awe and admiration for this great man because we got to revisit all that with him and the fact that he would actually turned around and reached out to his enemies and his jailers not only forgave them but asked them to work alongside him that's fairly remarkable what we there were plenty of people in Sarajevo and let me be very clear about this there were plenty of people in Sarajevo who thought that the idea of hating someone because of their religion was a pretty stupid idea it wasn't only the Jews it's just that this particular story resonates so greatly today in schools, in our public schools all over the United States we specialize in our big schools are in South Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama and Texas and where most of the kids by the way in our schools we look at the data free or reduced lunches and yet they find in this story Holocaust survivors who turned a synagogue into a non-sectarian aid agency where they worked with their friends and their neighbors no matter what their religion to work together and really to stand against hate it was a there's no such thing I believe is I know I work in education now and have been for a while I don't much care for the term genocide prevention it's something that man has specialized in since a man has been there but we must always fight the good fight we must always look for ethical models we must always look for those models that mean something to us morally and this is what we had 20 years ago in Sarajevo with with this little Jewish community I guess I would close by saying you know that for those of you who make bread you can have all the ingredients but if you don't have that little tiny bit of salt to put in it it'll taste pretty flat and I think that's perhaps what the Jews brought to their 500 years in Bosnia and I hope that they will continue to do that for a long time to come I want to thank you very much for coming and if you have any questions or would like to point anything out or make a statement or comment please feel free to do so be happy to hear from you we are videotaping this so when you ask your question and Ed calls in you wait for me to come with the microphone I actually have comments to make you know it started basically when the Serbians had against the Croatians for the slaughter in World War II at the hands of the Estasi and at the break of the Yugoslavia Serbians inherited the army they were the majority so they started that then Bill Clinton had his arms embargo that allowed the thing to grow out of hand the Croatians when they had weapons they could fight it back and that happened and if Woodrow Wilson had kept us out of war then Germany would have been totally defeated giving rise to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and it's traceable to Lincoln keeping the Union together and all traceable U.S. Constitution so I'd rather get to the virus that causes the trouble that alliances that are forged together by force of state that causes all the trouble and these people are very heroic but this is basically scratching the surface thank you as H. L. Menken said for every comment dear sir or madam you may very well be right what do you think was the overriding reason that it started I didn't really get that so much from the film and maybe that's too complicated but I just wondered if you could address that what you think kind of got things started and in general when I gave my speaking tours about this issue back in the 1990s the Serbian American community the Croatian American community always had people come to every one of my talks and of course everybody blamed everybody else and so although I do have certain opinions on them I'll say just a couple of things I generally tend to shy away from that because everyone else was talking politics and I wanted to concentrate on scratching the surface one microcosm of how this one group of people simply refused to hate their neighbors because of their religion the short point to make in regards to Yugoslavia and the war and the film doesn't address that because we use this film in schools everywhere and you're not going to be able to discuss the Balkan wars the Yugoslav wars and the disintegration of Yugoslavia in an 11 minute film basically Yugoslavia was an artificial creation that came about after 1918 it was fairly unworkable when it first started and there were many of those that artificial state that in 1941 when the Germans invaded who were happy to see the end of it that Civil War broke out among the players then after 1944-45 Yugoslavia was reborn as a socialist republic under Tito you could say that Tito was the last Habsburg in the sense that in the Austro-Hungarian empire no one had to be loyal to the empire itself which was a ridiculously complex multi-ethnic empire you just had to be true Kaiser Troy, they would say true to the Kaiser, the emperor and that lasted and Tito was everybody's favorite dictator with Sofia Loren on one arm and Gina Lola Bridget on the other on the deck of his yacht and his wife Scowling in the background and magnificent homes, everybody's favorite dictator and big Cuban cigars but Yugoslavia would not outlast him and it did not, it took only a few years before it collapsed nationalism works nationalism goes into play when you have to distribute losses Yugoslavia economically was a disaster zone under Tito he kept pushing things back by giving more power to each of the disparate republics they developed their own economies which were basically competing with each other in places where they shouldn't have had them anyway the point being is that Yugoslavia was held together with wild inflation or while excuse me, while there was wild inflation the only hard currency earners in the state were foreign tourists and the remittances that families were working in Germany and Austria were sending back and that was it and they made some really, really bad cars and we'll all remember the Hugo and the and what the country did what Yugoslavia did not need was a brilliant strongman nationalist which it got in Slobodan Milosevic the great men of history theory than many people would say that it was through him that this started and what he needed was a thuggish nationalist who wasn't as smart as he on the other side from the Croatian side and that's what he got in Franjo Tudjman and this is only my own interpretation and therein lies the rub and therein started the war the allies were perfectly the Europeans were perfectly happy to let this continue and they did it was in regards to the Americans who came in in 1995 never forget that it was Bob Dole who threatened to make Yugoslavia an election campaign an election issue for the 1996 election it was because he was making that noise that the Clinton administration finally decided to listen to the two biggest vocal supporters which was Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrook and then acted very very very very late far too late and the Dayton Accords did a good job of stopping the war and freezing everything in Aspic and it's been a mess ever since and it's not a happy story now Well we'll have to end on that note but I want to thank all of you for coming I want to thank Ed for such a wonderful program wonderful exhibit I want to thank Xena for sharing her wonderful story